Jim Miller on Politics

Pseudo-Random Thoughts

Ever Suspect That Leftists Don't Understand Basic Economics? Then
you'll like the results of this
poll.

Who is better informed about the policy choices facing the country—liberals, conservatives or
libertarians? According to a Zogby International survey that I write about in the May issue of Econ
Journal Watch, the answer is unequivocal: The left flunks Econ 101.

Zogby researcher Zeljka Buturovic and I considered the 4,835 respondents' (all American adults) answers
to eight survey questions about basic economics. We also asked the respondents about their political
leanings: progressive/very liberal; liberal; moderate; conservative; very conservative; and
libertarian.
. . .
How did the six ideological groups do overall? Here they are, best to worst, with an average number
of incorrect responses from 0 to 8: Very conservative, 1.30; Libertarian, 1.38; Conservative, 1.67; Moderate,
3.67; Liberal, 4.69; Progressive/very liberal, 5.26.

Americans in the first three categories do reasonably well. But the left has trouble squaring economic
thinking with their political psychology, morals and aesthetics.

The results are amusing — until you remember how many voters there are in those last two groups.

California Voters Don't Like Any of their major
politicians,
as Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling just learned.

We'd never done a public poll in California before last week and the thing I found most remarkable was
how much voters in the state hate all of their politicians.

Arnold Schwarzenegger of course is the least popular Governor in the country with a 20/64 approval
rating. The battle to replace him looks like it will be between someone marginally unpopular
(Jerry Brown and his 37/39 favorability ratio) and someone very unpopular (Meg Whitman and
her 24/44 favorability ratio.)

The state's senior senator, Dianne Feinstein, has the best rating of any prominent California
politician: 41-41.

Perhaps the voters are unhappy because California politicians haven't performed well in recent decades?
(Though that doesn't explain why so many dislike Whitman and Fiorina, who have never held
public office.)

(Meanwhile, California's economy is
lagging,
enough to slow down the nation's recovery.)

The Inevitable Failure of the Euro: Most economists expected it
to fail, and were surprised, if anything, by how long it has lasted. Martin Feldstein, who was one
of the economists who expected the euro to fail,
explains why, one more time.

The current crisis of the European single currency was an accident waiting to happen. The
adverse consequences of imposing a single currency on a disparate group of countries were initially
hidden by the short-run advantages that the weakest countries enjoyed when they adopted the euro
in 1999—and by the favorable global economic conditions that prevailed until 2008. But we now
see very serious problems affecting both individual eurozone countries and the overall single
currency system.

Many economists warned of these dangers even before the euro was adopted. (My own analysis, first
published in the Economist in June 1992, predicted many of the problems that I will spell out
here.) The euro's political proponents did not understand the likely adverse economic
consequences of its adoption, or even care about them. They wanted the single currency as
a way of achieving stronger political cohesion in Europe, going beyond the free trade agreement of
the European Union toward a full political union.

Read the whole thing for the gory details.

The Telegraph polled business economists and found that a plurality now expect the European
Union to
give up the euro.

Of the 25 leading City economists who took part in the Telegraph survey, 12 predicted that the euro would
not survive in its current form this Parliamentary term, compared with eight who suspected it would.
. . .
Two of the eight experts who predicted that the currency would survive said it would do so only at the
cost of seeing at least one of its members default on its sovereign debt. Andrew Lilico, chief
economist at think tank Policy Exchange, said there was "nearly zero chance" of the euro surviving with
its current membership, adding: "Greece will certainly default on its debts, and it is an open question
whether Greece will experience some form of revolution or coup — I'd put the likelihood of that over
the next five years as around one in four."

(Of course, being economists, they may be underestimating the ability of politicians and bureaucrats to avoid
recognition of economic realities, at least in the short term. But you have to recognize that
sending mostly German rescue money to Greece has so far annoyed voters in both countries, so you
wouldn't expect that to continue forever.)

In the short term, this will not be good for the United States; we are better off when Europe is prosperous
and peaceful. There is no way for the EU to abandon the euro without serious short term
disruptions. In the long term, probably even in the medium term, the sooner they abandon this
failed experiment the better off everyone will be.

Robert Samuelson Rediscovers What Better Engineers Have Known
Since The 19th Century: Success often leads to
failure.

Cost-cutting by BP, careless rig operators and lax regulators have all been fingered as plausible culprits
in the blowout. President Obama has appointed a commission to investigate the causes, and the
Justice Department has launched a criminal investigation. There will be extensive
analyses. But the stark contrast between the disaster's magnitude and the previous safety
record points to another perverse possibility: The success of deepwater drilling led to failure. It
sowed overconfidence. Continuing achievements obscured the dangers.

Samuelson believes this is "perverse", but it is something that better engineers have known since at least
the 19th century. A successful design is copied and enlarged and extended and modified until it
fails. And then, if all goes well, the engineers learn enough from the failure to prevent other,
similar failures.

There is no permanent escape from this dilemma, whether we are designing bridges or financial
systems. Redundancy often helps, as the old, old "belt-and-suspenders" example reminds
us.

And I think that we can avoid some failures if we remember the KISS principle.
It's advice that engineers often give themselves: Keep It Simple, Stupid. In other words,
recognize your limits, and try to keep your designs simple so that you can understand how they might
fail. I think that advice is just as useful for those trying to reform our financial system as
for those trying to design a better bridge, or cap a leaking oil well.

(Similarly, those who have studied military history know that generals tend to copy earlier successful
generals — until the copy fails.

In software, the tendency to extend a successful design, and to increase its complexity, is commonly called
the "second-system effect".)

Internet Slow Down? In the last month or so, I have encountered
many delays in accessing sites. Almost every day, I get messages from the browser saying that
it could not access a popular site (and sometimes even an unpopular site).

(The computer I built earlier this year has a good video card, so when I do get to the sites, they pop
right up on the screen, which makes the earlier wait even more annoying.)

Have you been running into similar problems? And, if so, when did they start for you?

(I have read that AT&T's network has slowed in some cities because of the heavy demands from
iPad users. I wouldn't expect that to have much effect on other users, but I may be wrong about
that.

For those interested, some technical details: I have a 3 meg DSL connection through
Verizon. It's been extremely reliable, and, the one time I checked, was running at 90 percent of
the rated speed, which is about as good as you can expect. I see the problems in both Ubuntu
10.4 and Windows 7, with several different browsers.)

Many Voters Are Unhappy With Democratic Congressmen: But the
congressmen know what to do about that little problem; most are
hiding from the voters.

If the time-honored tradition of the political meeting is not quite dead, it seems to be teetering closer
to extinction. Of the 255 Democrats who make up the majority in the House, only a handful
held town-hall-style forums as legislators spent last week at home in their districts.

It was no scheduling accident.

With images of overheated, finger-waving crowds still seared into their minds from the discontent of
last August, many Democrats heeded the advice of party leaders and tried to avoid unscripted
question-and-answer sessions. The recommendations were clear: hold events in controlled
settings — a bank or credit union, for example — or tour local businesses or participate
in community service projects.

Most of the Democratic incumbents don't feel they can learn anything from the voters, anyway, but
in the past they felt obliged to pretend to listen to voters. Now they are just
skipping that part of their job.

Rep. Charles Rangel compared President Obama to former Vice President Dick Cheney Saturday for
their shared commitment to the Iraq War, one the Harlem Democrat argues is based on the country's
hunger for oil.

"I challenge anyone to tell me we aren't there because of the oil," said Rangel, who kicks off his
re-election campaign for a 21st congressional term in Washington Heights Sunday.

"The lack of an honest explanation [for the war] is consistent with Bush and Cheney," he told the Daily
News during an hour-long interview that touched on his ongoing ethics probe, relationship with the
President and ability to get work done in Washington.

Congressman Rangel has a pleasant thought, but he gives Obama too much credit.

(The congressman may be feeling a little grumpy these days, what with the ethics probes, and the
primary challenges.)

Are Obama's Policies Hindering The Recovery? Michael Barone
ends a column speculating on the November election results with that
tentative thought.

We may be seeing something like the "capital strike" of the late 1930s, when investors and entrepreneurs
held onto their money and refrained from creating jobs because of high tax rates and intrusive
government.

Meanwhile, the Obama Democrats' legislative agenda threatens recovery. The cap-and-trade bill
would impose huge costs on the economy now for benefits promised decades hence. Legalizing
illegal immigrants would hold down low earners' wages. Higher taxes on high earners next year,
when Democrats will let the Bush tax cuts expire, will tend to retard rather than stimulate growth.

So the road to November looks bumpy for both parties. But while the Republicans are encountering
speed bumps, the Democrats are in danger of facing Jersey barriers and "road closed" signs.
Fundamentals matter.

Some Obama policies — the temporary tax cuts, for example — have certainly stimulated
the economy. Others, notably the immense increase in regulation, must have slowed the
recovery. It is hard to know now whether the pluses add up to more than the minuses. But
we do know one thing; so far job growth has been far too slow.

Back To Morocco, Yemen, Iran, And Iraq? You have probably heard
that journalist Helen Thomas called for Israelis to "go back" to
Poland and Germany.
(She apologized after her outrageous statements became
public,
but most will find her earlier statements easier to believe than her apology. By the way,
the video is brief, and well worth watching, for those who want to understand how she thinks.)

What this shows, besides Thomas's bias, is her ignorance. Jews have lived in Israel for more than
three millennia, and in Jerusalem since about 1000 BC, when the city was captured by King David.
They spread out from Israel, sometimes voluntarily, sometimes not, but never completely abandoned
their land.

In particular they spread all over the Middle East and North Africa, into what became, by conquest, Muslim
lands. And they were still in those lands in the 19th century, when some Jews
began to return to their ancient homeland, hoping to have a nation of their own.

In some Muslim lands, especially when there were strong leaders who wanted to use the Jewish population,
the Jews were tolerated, though always officially second-class citizens. But they were often
persecuted, especially when central governments were weak.

We can get some idea of how they lived from a famous essay by George Orwell. In September 1938,
Orwell left England for a six month stay in French Morocco. (He was hoping to
restore his damaged health in a warmer climate.) While there, he wrote
Marrakech. The essay
includes four chilling paragraphs on the conditions in the Jewish quarter.

When you go through the Jewish quarters you gather some idea of what the medieval ghettoes were
probably like. Under their Moorish rulers the Jews were only allowed to own land in certain
restricted areas, and after centuries of this kind of treatment they have ceased to bother about
overcrowding. Many of the streets are a good deal less than six feet wide, the houses are
completely windowless, and sore-eyed children cluster everywhere in unbelievable numbers, like clouds
of flies. Down the centre of the street there is generally running a little river of urine.

In the bazaar huge families of Jews, all dressed in the long black robe and little black skull-cap, are
working in dark fly-infested booths that look like caves. A carpenter sits cross-legged at a
prehistoric lathe, turning chair-legs at lightning speed. He works the lathe with a bow in his right
hand and guides the chisel with his left foot, and thanks to a lifetime of sitting in this position his left leg
is warped out of shape. At his side his grandson, aged six, is already starting on the simpler
parts of the job.

I was just passing the coppersmiths' booths when somebody noticed that I was lighting a cigarette.
Instantly, from the dark holes all round, there was a frenzied rush of Jews, many of them old grandfathers
with flowing grey beards, all clamouring for a cigarette. Even a blind man somewhere at the back
of one of the booths heard a rumour of cigarettes and came crawling out, groping in the air with his
hand. In about a minute I had used up the whole packet. None of these people, I suppose,
works less than twelve hours a day, and every one of them looks on a cigarette as a more or less
impossible luxury.

As the Jews live in self-contained communities they follow the same trades as the Arabs, except for
agriculture. Fruit-sellers, potters, silversmiths, blacksmiths, butchers, leather-workers, tailors,
water-carriers, beggars, porters--whichever way you look you see nothing but Jews. As a matter
of fact there are thirteen thousand of them, all living in the space of a few acres.

Morocco was not the worst place for Jews in the Middle East or North Africa; in fact, it was probably about
average. (The worst may have been
Yemen.)

After Israel declared its independence in 1948, many of the Jews in these Muslim lands moved to Israel,
some voluntarily, some not. (You can find some numbers in this
Wikipedia article, with the
usual Wikipedia caveats.) At one time, they and their descendants made up about half of
the population of Israel. (The proportion may be lower now, after the mass emigration from the
Soviet Union.)

If Israelis were to take Helen Thomas's advice and go back to where they, or their parents, or their
grandparents, came from, some would stay right where they are. But a great many would have to
return to hostile Muslim nations. As far as I know, none of those nations would welcome them with
open arms, and make them equal citizens.

For Helen Thomas not to know these facts shows remarkable determination on her part. It is hard
not to suspect that she shows malicious determination in having avoided them all these years.

(In 1938, most of Morocco was ruled by France. The French authorities did not find it
desirable to extend liberté to their Jewish subjects in Morocco, much less
égalité or fraternité.)

Rewards Are Legal, But Not Bribes? That's my very short, and
probably misleading, summary of the law governing the offers to Sestak and Romanoff. By way of
Ann Althouse
I found this Heritage analysis.

Some claim that even if Sestak was offered a high-ranking job in exchange for dropping out of the Senate
race, it would not have constituted a crime—that's just "business as usual" in Washington.
But such claims confuse two very different situations: one which is, indeed, business as usual; the other,
a potential crime.

A 1980 opinion issued by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) at the Justice Department outlines the key
distinction between what is legal and what is illegal under federal law. What is perfectly legal and
what happens all the time in Washington is individuals being offered jobs for past political activity.
A new President has several thousand patronage jobs to fill in the top ranks of the executive branch.
Those jobs are filled based on a mix of professional competence and past political activity and support for
the President or his party. That process does not violate federal law. Thus, if someone in
the White House simply offered Sestak a job and did not tie the offer to anything related to the Senate
race, then, that would arguably constitute business as usual.

However, what is illegal and not normal practice in Washington is to promise a federal job or appointment
to an individual in exchange for future political activity. 18 U.S.C. § 600 prohibits the use of
government-funded jobs or programs to advance partisan political interests. The statute makes it
unlawful for anyone to "promise any employment, position, compensation, contract, appointment, or other
benefit" to any person as a "consideration, favor, or reward for any political activity or for the support of
or opposition to any candidate or any political party . . . in connection with any primary election." As
the OLC opinion says, § 600 "punishes those who promise federal employment or benefits as an
enticement to or reward for future political activity, but does not prohibit rewards for past political
activity." Future political activity would arguably include dropping out of a contested primary in
order to benefit the White House-endorsed candidate (here, Sen. Specter).

But I should add that I am not a lawyer, and do not even play one on TV.

Bad News On Jobs: Which might seem strange since the Bureau of
Labor Statistics estimates that we added more than 400,000 jobs last month. But, as nearly everyone
recognizes, almost all of those jobs were
temporary census jobs.

Virtually all the job creation in May came from the hiring of 411,000 census workers. Such hiring
peaked in May and will begin tailing off in June.

By contrast, hiring by private employers, the backbone of the economy, slowed sharply. They added
just 41,000 jobs, down from 218,000 in April and the fewest since January.

For perspective, recall that we need to add some jobs every month just to keep up with population growth
and immigration. How many? I've seen different numbers, and the number must depend partly
on the flow of immigrants, for which we have only rough estimates. But the number is probably
between 100,000 and 175,000 jobs per month. So when we add just 41,000 private sector jobs, we
are probably losing ground.

Here's the BLS press release, if you want
the raw data. Men and most minorities have been hardest hit in this recession.

The higher unemployment rate for men is partly the result of federal government policy; when the stimulus
plan was being concocted in Congress, feminists in the Democratic majority pushed, with considerable
success, to redirect money to jobs mostly held by women. In most past recessions, women were
more likely to be unemployed.

Hope For Change: If you are a
cat. Today's New York Times had a
full-page ad for "Cats Against Clay". Their motto is:"Cats everywhere mandate that our litter must
change". Above that motto is a stylized picture of a cat that looks vaguely familiar, perhaps because
it is modeled on a similar picture of a successful American politician.

(I looked for an on-line picture of the campaign poster, without success. And it is way too big for
my scanner. Maybe the organization will post it, eventually.

Since I don't own a cat (or, from the cat's point of view, am not owned by a cat), I don't know enough about
the subject to have an opinion on their campaign.)

Why Is That Guatemalan Sinkhole So Round? Why does it look as if
it were bored by giant drill, rather than formed by a natural process?

It is common for natural sinkholes to be circular; for some examples see this
Washington Post collection
of pictures. Far more of them are circular than you would expect by chance.

But I haven't been able to think of any natural process that would have such regular results.

Any ideas?

(Offhand, I can think of only one other geological feature that is often cylindrical, natural
potholes. But I think I know how those form.
When I was growing up, I used to wonder about the potholes I saw in the bed of the
Wenatchee River. But then I noticed
that there was a rock at the bottom of almost every pothole, stretching from side to side. And I so I
began to think that the river, over many years, rotated that rock, and slowly ground out a cylindrical
pothole.)

Congressman Joe Sestak Must be Feeling Jealous: According to most
news accounts — which may even be true — he was only offered one unpaid job to drop his
primary challenge to Senator Arlen Specter. In contrast, Andrew Romanoff was offered three
jobs, all of them paid, to drop his primary challenge to Colorado Senator
Michael Bennet.

(The reports about the offer to Sestak have never made much sense to me. I can't see why anyone
would expect a man that aggressive to leave his seat in Congress for an unpaid job on an advisory
panel. It is possible, of course, that the White House and Bill Clinton didn't realize that Sestak would
have to leave Congress to be on the panel, but if they did, then the offer seems absurdly small, like trying
to bribe a judge with a Hershey bar.)

The 2008 Kangaroo Ticket: I have always liked Joe Biden, but have
never thought of him as a great statesman. Despite that, I thought it was obvious in 2008 that he was
more qualified than Barack Obama to be president.

The evidence continues to accumulate for that common-sense observation. Here's the
latest bit.

Vice President Joe Biden offered the White House's strongest defense yet of Israeli's actions off the coast
of Gaza this week in an interview with Charlie Rose airing tonight on PBS.

"I think Israel has an absolute right to deal with its security interest. I put all this back on two
things: one, Hamas, and, two, Israel's need to be more generous relative to the Palestinian people who
are in trouble in Gaza," Biden said, according to a transcript of the interview, in which he went on to
discuss Hamas's control of Gaza:

"[The Israelis have] said, 'Here you go. You're in the Mediterranean. This ship — if
you divert slightly north you can unload it and we'll get the stuff into Gaza.' So what's the big deal
here? What's the big deal of insisting it go straight to Gaza? Well, it's legitimate for Israel
to say, 'I don't know what's on that ship. These guys are dropping eight — 3,000 rockets
on my people,'" Biden said.

Isn't that much better than anything Obama has said on the incident?

(Ben Smith ascribes that position to the "White House". I suspect Biden was free lancing, as he often
does.

Reported Racist Attack In Seattle Is No Big Deal: Because, as you have
already figured out, the victim was
white.

Seattle Police are investigating to determine if an attack on a 16-year-old West Seattle boy was racially
motivated.

Shane McClellan's father says his son was walking home from a friend's house Tuesday around 2 a.m.
when he was approached by two men - one black and one Asian.

Asking him first for a light, they then attacked him, kicking and hitting him and threatening him with a gun,
said McClellan.

"They started punching, knocked him down, kicking him, robbed him of everything, stole his coat, shoved
him to the ground, stuck a gun in the back of his head," described McClellan. "I can't tell you
what it's like to see and not even be able to recognize your son."

McClellan says they also burned the back of Shane's neck with cigarette butts before taking out a belt and
making the racially-charged comments.

(Note, please, that I said "reported". As of now, we have the story that Shane McClellan told the
police. And we have the police
report of their encounter with the
two suspects, who
were found with blood on their hands. But we don't have any confirming evidence that his attackers
were racially motivated.)

Sensational charges, definitely. So, are our local journalists rushing out to cover this story?
No. A Google News
search
on his name got just fifteen hits — and only two of them were about this case. The Seattle
Times, our local monopoly paper, appears to have done no original reporting on the story at
all.

(One reason some people are skeptical about McClellan's story is that he does not seem to be a
model citizen. If this is his
MySpace page, as it appears to be, I can
understand why people would not, automatically, trust everything he says.)

Gallup's Generic Vote Converges On Rasmussen's: You may have
seen this surprising result from
Gallup.

Gallup tracking of 2010 congressional voting preferences shows Republicans moving back ahead of
Democrats, 49% to 43%, by two points their largest lead of the campaign to date. Registered
voters' preferences had been closely divided for the last several weeks.

That result is close to the result
Rasmussen has been getting for months.
.

(Note that I am using the traditional — and logical — colors for the two parties, rather than
the colors inflicted on us by the "mainstream" media.)

The difference between the two polls is about what one expect, given that Gallup polled registered voters,
and Rasmussen likely voters. Even so, the Gallup result is so good that I am not sure
whether to believe it. (I long ago learned to distrust polls that had results that I really like.)

That said, if Gallup is right, then the Republicans would probably win a solid majority of the House —
if the election were to be held today.

This Time, The Regulators Will Succeed: Samuel Johnson once said that
a second marriage is the
"triumph of hope over experience". There is,
we all know, some truth in his quip, though many second marriages do succeed.

We have had, in this country and elsewhere, a long string of regulatory failures. The Securities and
Exchange Commission failed to recognize
Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme. The
Interior Department has mismanaged assets of many Indian tribes for decades. The
Minerals Management Services, which is supposed to supervise offshore drilling has a long history of
problems.

Serious concerns about the agency were raised as early as 2006, when Representative Darrell E. Issa,
Republican of California, led the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in a series of
hearings on problems in deepwater oil leases during the Clinton administration that freed companies from
paying billions of dollars in royalties.

Earl E. Devaney, the Interior Department's inspector general, testified at those hearings about a culture of
"managerial irresponsibility and a lack of accountability" at the agency.

And anyone who has followed the news for even a few years can add many more to that brief list.

But these facts have not reached David Leonhardt of the New York Times; he remains convinced that
regulators can
save us from ourselves.
Two paragraphs after noting that regulators Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan failed to recognize
a bubble in the housing market, Leonhardt argues:

When the stakes are high enough, it falls to government to help its citizens avoid these entirely human
errors. The market, left to its own devices, often cannot do so.

To drive his point home, Leonhardt immediately argues that government regulations made a big oil spill
more likely.

Tom Maguire, who drew this article to my attention, concludes that Leonhardt believes in
"Non-Human Regulatory Overlords",
who, presumably, would not have the faults of mere humans. Alas, Leonhardt does not tell us
where we are to acquire these non-human regulators. (Leonhardt also believes in the existence
of super bureaucrats, though he doesn't provide any
examples of those creatures.)

If a second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience, what should we call the belief in super
regulators, after so many regulatory failures? The triumph of delusion over experience?
Or, perhaps, the triumph of ideology over experience, in Leonhardt's case.

Obama could not have risen so far so fast without a profound understanding of the Chicago Way. And
he has brought the Chicago Way to the White House.

One prime assumption of the Chicago Way is that there will always be a bounteous private sector that
politicians can plunder endlessly. Chicago was America's boom town from 1860 to 1900, growing from
nothing to the center of the nation's railroad network, the key nexus between farm and factory, the
headquarters of great retailers and national trade associations.
. . .
Crony capitalism also comes naturally to a Chicago Way president. Use some sweeteners to get the
drug companies and the doctors to sign on to the health care plan. If the health insurers start
bellyaching, whack them a few times in public to make them go along. Design a financial reform
that Goldman Sachs and JPMorganChase can live with even while you assail "Wall Street fat cats."

The big guys will understand that you have to provide the voters with some political theater while you give
them what they want. As for the little guys, well, hey, in Chicago we don't back no losers.

Two of Obama's allies, radical preacher Jeremiah Wright and corrupt fixer
Tony Rezko show how well Obama learned the
Chicago Way. Each man exempliflies one side of the Chicago Way, Wright the naked appeals to race
and ethnicity, what Barone calls political theater, and Rezko the deal making that provides the money for the
political organization.

Harrison Schmitt is
not impressed
by the Obama administration's handling of the Gulf oil spill.

In contrast, failure clearly has been an option for President Obama and those claiming to have been on top
of this situation "from day one" in his White House and in the Departments of Interior, Energy and Homeland
Security. With no single, competent, courageous and knowledgeable leader in charge of a comparably
competent, courageous and knowledgeable team as we had with Apollo 13, the Administration has been
doomed to failure from the start. The President, without any experience in real-world management
of anything, much less a crisis, has no idea how to deal with a situation as technically complex as the Gulf
oil spill.

Juneuary: That's how one of the local weather forecasters described
the forecast for tonight and tomorrow in this area. We are supposed to get a January-type storm
(although it won't be as cold) with lots of rain and gusty winds. And they are predicting something
similar, though not as strong, for Friday.

So I've been out stocking up.

(One grocery store was selling a small
Coleman lantern.
Though that particular model is intended for backpackers, it wouldn't be a bad emergency light,
though most families would want a larger, more powerful lantern Of course, if you anticipate being
without power for days, you will probably want an LED lantern, extra batteries, or both.)

Poverty Doesn't Cause Crime: That isn't a surprise to anyone who
has looked at historical crime statistics, but it was a surprise to leftist (he would say liberal)
Richard Cohen.

This is a good news, bad news column. The good news is that crime is again down across the
nation -- in big cities, small cities, flourishing cities and cities that are not for the timid. Surprisingly,
this has happened in the teeth of the Great Recession, meaning that those disposed to attribute criminality
to poverty -- my view at one time -- have some strenuous rethinking to do. It could be, as
conservatives have insisted all along, that crime is committed by criminals. For liberals, this is bad
news indeed.

The figures are rather startling. From 2008 to 2009, violent crime was down 5.5 percent overall and
almost 7 percent in big cities. Some of those cities are as linked with crime as gin is with tonic or
as John McCain is with political opportunism. In Detroit, for instance, with the auto industry shedding
workers, violent crime was down 2.4 percent. In Washington, D.C., murder was down 23.1 percent,
rape 19.4 percent and property crime 6 percent. Stats for political corruption are not available.

Actually, it's a good news, good news column. Crime is down, and at least one liberal is recognizing
what the better criminologists have known for decades.

In the United States, crime has often risen with prosperity. You can see this clearly in the murder
statistics. In 1900, the murder rate was 1.2 per 100,000 per year. After two very prosperous
decades, it had reached almost 10 per 100,000. And then, during the Great Depression, it fell to less
than 5. During the prosperous 1960s, it rose again to almost 10. (It stayed high until about
1990, and then fell to less than 6 in the last decade of the 20th century.)

Other crimes show similar patterns. I suppose that we should be grateful that Cohen is finally
recognizing this, but we can't call him a quick learner.

Terrorist Organization Tries To Provoke Israel, And Succeeds: Nothing
novel about that, though the story of the "humanitarian" Gaza flotilla does show just how fiendishly clever
Israel's enemies can be.